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* * *

Kyrie looked from one to the other of the men, her mouth half open, as though all the words had escaped her and weren't coming back. Rafiel looked like he'd been put into an industrial threshing machine. His forehead was scratched, his arm showed blood through the shirt. He was walking as if he had—at the very least—a seriously bruised ankle.

Tom looked hungry. In fact, despite the fact that he'd announced to her, up front, that he'd already eaten, and even though his story made it clear he'd had something like ten hamburgers, he looked starved, and sniffed the air as if trying to inhale calories through sniffing in stray particles of cooking meat.

And yet, both of them looked as happy, as full of themselves as boys who had pulled off a really good prank. It had to be one of those male things, because she couldn't begin to imagine what was going through their minds. "And you went back?" she said. "For the boots and the ID?"

"And the clothes," Rafiel said, enthusiastically. "My clothes. Well, the shreds of them."

"I see," Kyrie said.

"It wasn't a big deal," Tom said, as his head swivelled to follow a gyro platter carried by Keith. "Dire wasn't there when we went back."

Yes, of course, that made it all right, Kyrie thought, as she sighed and despaired of explaining to these overgrown boys that, after all, Dante Dire had the power of messing with their minds. He might have made it seem that there was no one there. He might have jumped them from a dark corner. He might still be waiting to—She couldn't say any of it, certainly not in the diner, although the three of them were occupying the corner booth, under the picture of the dragon slayer, and there were no other occupied booths in this part of the diner.

Keith stopped by and dropped a plate entirely filled with gyro shavings and souvlaki in front of Tom, who looked up at him, surprised, "How did you know?"

Keith shrugged. "Meat-seeking behavior," he said. "I've come to know it." He looked from Rafiel to Tom. "What have you two been doing with yourselves?" he asked. And then paused, and bent over towards the table, his hands on the formica. "It isn't about Summer Avenir, right? I mean . . . is there some big fight going on that you guys haven't told me about?"

Kyrie sighed and shifted further into the booth. "Come. You can hear about it."

But Keith shook his head, and looked around at the tables. "Nah. Conan went to take a nap, he said, and that would leave the tables unattended."

Kyrie frowned. This sudden reluctance to run away with the shifter circus was not like Keith at all. A look at the young man showed her dark circles around his eyes and a general impression of being less than healthy. "Huh," she said.

"It's nothing, okay?" Keith said. He shrugged. "It's just that, you know, you guys always said that being a shifter was no picnic, that there was stuff . . . but you know, for me, it was all about fighting and . . . well, it was like being a superhero."

"Yeah, so you told us," Tom said.

"Only, then . . . Summer turned out to be the granddaughter of the newspaper owner, and to have been after cryptozoology stuff, and she endangered you and got herself killed . . . and now I know it's not . . . "—he looked at them, intently—"I assume it wasn't one of you. I wouldn't have come back if I thought it had been one of you."

"No," Kyrie said, shocked. "No. It's . . . one of the people we're fighting."

"People!" Keith said. "Somehow, no, I don't think it's people."

Kyrie felt shocked as if she'd been punched. "What about us?"

Keith sighed. "I want to say of course you're people . . ." he said. "I want to say it . . . but . . ." He looked away. "It would help if Tom didn't look like he could happily take a chunk out of a passing diner."

Tom, finger-deep in gyro meat, looked up. "Hey!"

"No . . . I know you're not like that," Keith said. "And of course you can trust me, and all. But . . . these . . . creatures, like the ones we fought against before . . . It's not like a computer game, and it's not like a comic, and it's not like being superheroes."

"We never said . . ."

"I know you didn't. But I'm an idiot, okay . . . and I thought . . ." He shrugged. "I thought a whole lot of stupid things. But it's not fun anymore. It's serious. And the things you guys fight, they're really serious too. I take it the . . . creature you're fighting is the one who was in here the other day talking about how I was just a transitive or something and—"

"Ephemeral," Tom said. "Because you live less than we do, and he—"

"Yeah. I got the gist. Anyway . . . I take it that's the big bad, and I wish you luck and all, but I want no part of it. I . . ." He took a deep breath. "I might as well tell you that I've applied for a scholarship to do the last two years of college abroad, in Italy. I was accepted. I'll be leaving at the end of the month. That's my two-weeks' notice."

They all looked at him, stunned. Oh, Kyrie understood what he was saying. In fact, they'd been the first to tell him that it wasn't fun, it wasn't like being a superhero, it wasn't anything of the kind. But Keith had been, in a way, the one normal human admitted to their fraternity, the one they could trust.

The one, Kyrie thought, who reassures us that we're still human.

"Sure," Tom said, sounding deflated. "Sure. I just . . . tell me the exact date and I'll make sure you have your check a couple of days in advance so that you can cash it before you fly, okay?"

Keith looked startled. Had he forgotten that Tom tried to take care of people no matter what? "Okay," he said, as he walked away.

And he couldn't be that mad at them, Kyrie thought, at least not consciously, because having seen Rafiel eye Tom's food jealously, he brought him a plate of meat as well, and silverware for both of them. "Anthony thinks you have a tapeworm," he said, walking away. "Both of you."

"You know," Rafiel said, "Dante Dire would say we need to kill Keith, to ensure our own safety."

Kyrie shook her head, feeling vaguely impatient. Dire could say whatever he wanted. Keith could say whatever he wanted for that matter. She could understand Dire's point about how hard it was to consider as people and as equals, people who didn't consider you human. But she was sure of something and that was that Dire was far more dangerous to Keith than Keith ever could be to any of them. The other thing was that Kyrie was fairly sure people were just . . . people. It was just that shifters had so many more means of causing harm than people who didn't at the drop of a hat grow claws and fangs. "You still didn't tell me," she said with a trace of impatience, "what you were doing at the aquarium today?"

"Oh," Tom shrugged and looked sheepish, managing to look much like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "We were installing a camera."

"Installing a what?"

"A camera. In that platform area where, clearly, there's been screwing going on."

"Why?" Kyrie asked. The idea was unfathomable. "So you guys could have your very own private porn channel? Isn't it kind of gruesome? I mean considering . . ."

"No," Tom said. "It's for an alarm. I've already installed the software in my laptop. You and I are going to keep watch on it. By turns. It beeps, you see . . . when someone moves in front of the camera and activates it."

"We're going to keep watch on it by turns?" Kyrie asked. "And what exactly do we do about The George, Tom? You still need to cook, and without Keith, or with Keith on reduced hours, I still need to wait tables. What do we do about that?"

The minute she said it, Tom's face fell, and she felt as though she were the most horrible woman alive. "Look, I can see where it's important, but . . ."

 

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Framed